1. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2000, No. 1 Summary
The 56-page 2000, No. 1 TUNING Letter issue was just completed. Electronic subscribers will receive their TUNING Letter today. Printed issues should be mailed before March 27. The CD-ROM containing all of 1991-1999 should be mailed next week.
HDS Goes Into Limited Production on S/390 Machines
Just as we were going to press with this issue, HDS dropped a bombshell: they have stopped marketing S/390 mainframes (Skylines, Triniums, and Pilots) to new customers. Rumors started to fly with Comparex’s February 25th press release saying that they were dropping their support for HDS storage and had just signed a five-year contract with EMC http://www.comparex.co.za/. Then on March 6th, HDS issued a press release, http://www.hds.com/news/000306.html, saying that they were going to concentrate on “next-generation enterprise server technology.” They will be going into limited production, but still maintaining their manufacturing line on Triniums, while working on their new server line. Computerworld had a story on March 7th http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/all/000307F4B6. HDS says they will continue to provide maintenance, services and future upgrades for current users of their S/390 Triniums, Skylines, and Pilots. While new Trinium models are expected to be installed in current customer sites, no new Pilot models are currently projected. My customers tell me that HDS salesmen are saying this will be a 12-18 month temporary hold on sales to new customers. Hitachi currently has a 12% market share. In an effort to keep customers from worrying about the future of S/390, Amdahl issued a press release March 6 http://www.amdahl.com/cgi-bin/press-index/20000306-001.htm indicating their commitment to a long term presence in the S/390 arena. Amdahl developers tell me that their 64-bit architecture is also right on schedule. Meta Group’s analysis on the HDS pullout is fairly unanimously agreed upon. They believe IBM’s aggressive Generation 5 and Generation 6 mainframes, 1999’s 50% S/390 MIPS pricing drop, and Trinium’s introductory stumble killed Hitachi’s profitability.
HFS Performance
Starting with earlier releases, but primarily in OS/390 R5, many of the base MVS components began using OS/390 UNIX System Services and, therefore, UNIX file services as supported by IBM’s Hierarchical File System, HFS. These components and facilities include TCP/IP, Domino Notes, WebServer, ERP applications, and many others. You will NOT be able to avoid HFS for much longer, as it has now become an integral part of OS/390. The performance of your HFS files will be critical to you. The focus of this TUNING Letter issue is on the performance management of your OS/390 UNIX file systems and HFS, and is written by Peter Enrico who has been doing some very interesting work in HFS tuning. See our introduction on page 8. To complement this issue on HFS, our Parmlib series continues with BPXPRMxx.
Elsewhere
In our S/390 News on page 4, I cover a little known fact about adding page data sets; provide APARs for TCP/IP, defrags, and HFS data sets on non-SMS managed volumes; report some interesting statistics on Shark (ESS) throughput; give some tuning tips for Easytrieve users; summarize the recent WSC flashes, including one on data integrity exposure for 9345 devices and two regarding updated documents on XCF performance and TCP/IP migration; and give a pointer to two new white papers on measuring end-to-end availability. Our Cheryl’s List reprints on page 53 provide an update on HDS Triniums and describe some problems with IBM’s Multiprise models, along with their new discounted pricing. Our Q&A on page 55 provides some general capacity planning recommendations.
Stay tuned!